Chris smiled and nodded, or shook hands, and Amos followed suit, but when they had reached Zachary, a tall young man of eighteen years or so, Zachary bent his handsome surly face and fumbled at his shoe. Chris stood there with his hand out, feeling the red blood surging angrily up his cheeks, and then he wondered who Zachary was looking at from the corner of his eye. Chris turned his head and did not have to hear the name muttered by Cilley or by Bowie at his back. Chris found himself staring at Claggett Chew. CHAPTER 13 Claggett Chew possessed a face and bearing not easily forgotten. A giant of a man, standing well over six feet three, he stood bareheaded in the morning sun. Contrary to the custom of the time, he wore no pigtail at his neck, nor even hair caught back, tied with a bow. Claggett Chew's head was shaved so close that the pale skin of his skull showed through the peppery stubble, making him seem bald. Below the bare skull, as if in counterbalance, his black eyebrows started out, tangled and thickly black, and under them, as out of a rocky cave, his small pale eyes blinked like cornered foxes in their dens. His nose, overlarge to start with, had at some time in his life been broken, and its crooked shape leaned to the right as if still bending beneath the blow that had battered it. [Illustration] A long untrimmed mustache shadowed his mouth, and stray hairs caught inside his lips when he opened and closed them. His lips, like his eyes, were pale, and his skin sickly as that of a man who sees but little of the light. His cheeks and chin were stubbly, like his head; his beard seemed more reluctant than half grown. His whole appearance, in his sallow yellow vest, gun-gray coat and breeches and canary-colored stockings, was one of mingled power and weakness; strength joined with an unhealthy habit of never being in the sun, and a cruelty best enjoyed when he knew that he could win. His cold eyes pinned Chris with their gaze as if the boy were a butterfly transfixed by a pin. His thin, pallid lips curled with disdain and yet, Chris thought, uneasiness perhaps, as he eyed the two lads and the little knot of men. One strong, too white hand held a whip, its long leather tail ending like a scorpion's sting, in a length of wire. He held the five feet of the whip loosely caught in his hand against the plaited leather handle, and Chris had an icy sensation as he looked at it that it was never far from the large white hand of Claggett Chew. A little behind Claggett Chew, examining the scene through a pair of jeweled lorgnettes, stood an even weirder figure. "Osterbridge Hawsey," whispered Ned Cilley, as if to himself, as he followed the direction of Chris's eyes.